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I always found hammering attacks to be extremely satisfying, even from a meta-physical pov. You escape a closed virtual universe by not "breaking out" in the t
by PeterStuer 1y ago
I always found hammering attacks to be extremely satisfying, even from a meta-physical pov.
You escape a closed virtual universe by not "breaking out" in the tradidional sense, exploiting some bug in the VM hypervisor's boundary itself, but by directly manipulating the underlying physics of the universe on wich the virtual universe is founded, just by creating a pattern inside the virtual universe itself.
No matter how many virtual digital layers, as long as you can impact the underlying analog substrate this might work.
Makes you dream there could be an equivalent for our own universe?
- arduinomancer 1y agoI tried knocking on my wall 100,000 times and it did indeed cause a disturbance in the neighbouring cell of my apartment Turns out this whole virtualized house abstraction is a sham
- N_Lens 1y agoThanks for the sensible chuckle.
- SandmanDP 1y ago> Makes you dream there could be an equivalent for our own universe? I’ve always considered that to be what’s achieved by the LHC: smashing the fundamental building blocks of our universe together at extreme enough energies to briefly cause ripples through the substrate of said universe
- whyowhy3484939 1y agoThat's assuming there is a substrate that can be disturbed. That's where the parent's analogy breaks down. As an example of an alternative analogy: think of how many bombs need to explode in your dreams before the "substrate" is "rippled". How big do the bombs need to be? How fast does the "matter" have to "move"? I think "reality" is more along those lines. If there is a substrate - and that's a big if - IMO it's more likely to be something pliable like "consciousness". Not in the least "disturbed" by anything moving in it.
- rolisz 1y agoA nightmare that makes you wake up screaming? I'd say that counts as disturbing the substrate.
- cwillu 1y agoIt's a pretty exact description: the universe is made of fields, smashing stable excitations of those fields together produces disturbances in other fields (“virtual particles”) that sometimes makes (fleetingly) stable excitations in other fields, which then fall apart through the same dance into different stable excitations than we started with, allowing us to prove that the field in the middle exists and start to determine its properties. https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basics/particle-physics-why-do-it-and-why-do-it-that-way/ https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-ph... https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basics/virtual-particles-what-are-they/ https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-ph...
- jerf 1y agoAnother way to think of it. Consider breaking out of Minecraft. Can you do it? Maybe. There are certainly ways to crash it today. But now let's go through some cycles of fixing those crashes, and we'll run it on a system that can handle the resource usage even if it slows down in the external reality's terms quite a bit. And we'll ignore the slash commands and just stick to the world interactions you can make. After that, can you forcefully break out of it from the inside? No. It is not obligatory for systems to include escape hatches. We're just not great at building complex systems without them. But there's no reason they are necessarily present in all systems. Another brain bender covering the same idea in a different direction: The current reigning candidate for BB(6) runs an incomprehensible amount of computation [1]. Yet, did it at any point "break out" into our world? Nope. Nor do any of the higher ones. They're completely sealed in their mathematical world, which is fortunate since any of them would sweep aside our entire universe without noticing. https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8972 https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8972
- BobaFloutist 1y agoI mean sometimes a dream upsets you enough that you wake up
- simiones 1y agoThe LHC doesn't generate anything like the kind of energy that you get when interstellar particles hit the Earth's upper atmosphere, nevermind what's happening inside the sun - and any of these are many, many orders of magnitude below the energies you get in a supernova, for example. The LHC is extremely impressive from a human engineering perspective, but it's nowhere close to pushing the boundaries of what's going on every second in the universe at large.
- robotnikman 1y agoThe closest thing I can thing of is a black hole.
- drcongo 1y agoI love that we can switch out LHC for LSD and this comment would still feel perfect.
- hoseja 1y agoWell for Earth life there are multiple but evolution just learned to exploit them all.
- lukan 1y ago"I always found hammering attacks to be extremely satisfying" On a philosophical level I somewhat agree, but on a practical level I am sad as this likely means reduced performance again.
- MangoToupe 1y agoOnly for places where you need security. Many types of computation do not need security.
- tuvang 1y agoIn theory, true. But fixes to issues like this are usually done on hardware level in future generations or very low level software level where most people don’t have the knowledge/effort to deal with. Resulting in our editors/games/job tools running slower they can to mitigate security issues irrelevant to our common use cases.
- lukan 1y agoMost devices are connected to the internet these days. Anything connected to the internet should be secure.
- fc417fc802 1y agoIf a task has been granted native GPU access then it's already on the inside of the security boundary. Conversely, if you don't trust a task then don't let it access the GPU (aside from passing the entire device through to a virtual machine). This attack doesn't change that reality.
- mouse_ 1y ago> Conversely, if you don't trust a task then don't let it access the (computer) Wow you just solved all of cyber security
- aspenmayer 1y ago
- sneak 1y agoIf we are in a simulation, the number of ways that could be the equivalent of SysRq or control-alt-delete are infinite. We haven’t even tried many of the simple/basic ones like moving objects at 0.9c.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1y agoTo ruin a great joke, particle accelerators do get up to 0.9999+ the speed of light.
- sneak 1y agoAhh, I forgot about those.
- BobaFloutist 1y agoI will say, I wouldn't personally call individual protons "objects"
- amelius 1y ago> No matter how many virtual digital layers So you are saying that a GPU program can find exploits in physics without having access to e.g. high energy physics tools? Sounds implausible.
- mistercow 1y ago> Makes you dream there could be an equivalent for our own universe? But would we even notice? As far as we were concerned, it would just be more physics.
- LeifCarrotson 1y agoThe real question is how we'd know about the physics of the parent universe. I think this short story is interesting to think about in that way: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5wMcKNAwB6X4mp9og/that-alien-message https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5wMcKNAwB6X4mp9og/that-alien...
- queuebert 1y ago> Makes you dream there could be an equivalent for our own universe? My idea to attack the simulation is psychological: make our own simulation that then makes its own simulation, and so on all the way down. That will sow doubt in the minds of the simulators that they themselves are a simulation and make them sympathetic to our plight.
- nemomarx 1y agoWhat if the simulators tell you they're also doing this? It could be turtles all the way up perhaps
- mrkstu 1y agoI remember as a kid in the 70’s I first heard about most physical things being empty space. Walking into a wall a few hundred times may have damaged my forehead almost as much as my trust in science…
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]